Saturday, April 30, 2011

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Quote attributed to Ben Franklin

(Even if it does turn out to be a mis-quote, it's still a great quote that ought to have been said by Franklin anyhow.)

Zymurgy is the art and science of fermentation. It gives us beer, wine, cider, mead and stuff like perry or metheglin. It makes a lot of things possible. It saved civilization when you couldn't drink the water without catching typhus or worse stuff because hygiene hadn't been invented yet. It also facilitated a lot of socialization that would never have happened without getting some beer into the bellies of hunters and gatherers--it may well be the reason people began to raise grain, hops and so forth. Or not. This is a hypothesis that makes more sense when one is imbibing a few brews, and often doesn't stand up to close scrutiny without the benefit of a few good beers...much like a lot of people you can meet in places that dispense this stuff.

Ahem.

Zymurgy is also behind pickles and sauerkrautand Kim Chi--anything that is a product of the fermentation process. Pickling food not only cooks it, it is a way to preserve stuff for long periods of time. Cabbage, in one form or another has been a staple in the human diet for millennia, and sauerkraut likewise goes back a long, long ways. But instead of doing yet another really long and detailed essay on all this stuff, we've decided to go and enjoy a few beers, brats and kraut at our favorite local happy place of beer-ness.

If you want to have some fun, take a look at the Fantasy Brewmasters site. This is a project that is well worth toasting with a few well-chosen beers.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Tarot -- See Separate Tarot Resources/References post.
Or you could just download a free copy of A. E. Waite's classic Pictorial Guide to the Tarot, while you're waiting...

Tabula Rasa
Interesting and eclectic resource, featuring a history of horror, comics galleries, some RPG stuff and more.TED
Ideas worth spreading. We love TED. You should check it out--there's just so much cool stuff at this site!

Theosophy books for Free
Lots and lots of those old books that so many newage authors pilfer thinking that no one else has ever read them. Now you can not only read them for yourself, you can pilfer them to your heart's content as fodder for your own games, self-help scams, or whatever.

Nothing New Under the Sun
A random headline, some spurious archaeology, and a flight of fancy that leads one all the way back to Old Earth along a river network that passes through pseudo-Egyptian synthecultures. Welcome to the early, formative days of Riskail.

Of Ley-Lines and Such
Ley-Lines, they're not just for breakfast any more. We'll be coming back to this subject with a couple more posts shortly, including a handy-dandy way to incorporate Ley-Lines into your current setting/world relatively painlessly...

Only Human
Thoughts on the implications of 'being human,' and where that might lead in a place such as Riskail.

Underlying Principles of Sorcery & Magic (for Riskail)
A survey and consideration of various underlying principles that make magic and sorcery distinct based upon how they are approached, perceived culturally, and acted upon by their respective practitioners.

Everyone grows old, they might not ever really grow up, but they do succumb to the effects of aging. We are all under the tyranny of the spectre of death. The one thing that all living things have in common is their certain, eventual extinction. Some find this comforting, others are fighting it tooth and nail with every conceivable scientific technique, newage mumbo-jumbo, and everything in-between.

Longevity is the aim of most of this research. Life Extension. Living longer. Keeping your wits about you as the inevitable still happens, only at a slower rate. It seems like a lot of wishful thinking to counter entropy, the way most of the research is being described. But that might be the fault of the media and various experts not wanting to trouble the public with too many things above a third grade reading level. A lot of unfounded claims have been bandied about, tons of new products, mostly snake-oil, are aimed at the ageing population. It's hard not to become jaded or cynical, but probably is a good idea to remain somewhat skeptical of it all.

If you dig deeper, there are some rather intriguing things coming out of the various clinics, labs and research facilities focusing on aging, longevity and how to make the most of the biological hand that's been dealt us in the great poker game of life. But hey, at least it isn't just a big crap shoot. Or is it? Was that Lovecraft again--shut up HPL. You're dead. Get back in your box. Man, is he starting to smell again.

Kronos Longevity Research Institute, with a name like Kronos you know they must be serious about using their time wisely or else they have serious issues regarding offspring, not to mention indelicate dietary habits...

Longevity is interesting. Life Extension is alluring. Both have a lot of promise and we probably ought to do some of these things, like eating right, getting more exercise, and all that stuff. Brush your teeth too. Wow, do a lot of people think that some spritzed-on spray is equivalent to bathing/showering--and you'd be appalled to learn how many people don't brush their teeth, let alone don't wash their hands after going to the rest room. But hey, we all want to live forever. Right?

Maybe not. Immortality has some serious downsides. But it does kinda beat the snot out of mortality, as long as we can dictate terms. No one wants to live out their lives as an elderly geriatric for ten thousand years, at least not voluntarily. Though it might be the sort of thing that happens when meddlesome hackers exploit terrifying viruxiveweapons. We want to live longer, but not get older, after a certain point. No one would want to be locked in the perpetual hormonal hell of a thousand-year-long puberty.

Getting old sucks. The whole process of senescenceis frightening and a major component of most monstrous beings across nearly all human cultures are tell-tale references to the characteristics of aging, senescence, decrepitude and dementia. We've been afraid of growing old possibly even longer than we've been afraid of dying. And that makes sense. Death is an end that might lead to some unknown something beyond it, while aging has no positive outcome other than death, with a whole lot of helplessness, frailties, vulnerabilities, and humiliations that just get worse and worse as the process continues. It's a horrifying, one-way transformation that changes us into things that we could never see ourselves being as children or young people.

Sure, it's unfair, wrong-headed and cruel to have this attitude, but it is ingrained within our culture. We not only worship youth via the advertising efforts of megacorporations, we villify aging--was the Wicked Old Witch a hot young babe? Nope. Dirty Old Man. Groddy Old Troll. Unless you visit Midwichor Dunwich, it's not the pretty children who are the monsters, but the old things. The Old Ones. Damn it HPL, I told you--get back in there or I'll get out the cattle prod again.

Good.

A clamcan live for 374 years. A frikkin clam. You can look over the list of Long-Lived Organisms at Wikipedia. Biological Immortality might not be all that far-fetched, if one were able to reduce the number of accidents, disasters and unforeseen circumstances surrounding and impinging upon our lives. But that'd take a control freak even mightier than Dr. Forbin's Colossus, even with the upgrades that went along with merging with Guardian.

But even if we do eliminate all of that sort of spontaneity, chaos and involuntary change from our lives, what then? Toxic boredom. Endless millennia of narcissistic ennui that'd turn even Elric's stomach.

Longevity isn't the answer. It's a red herring. A grail-shaped beacon, if you will.

The answer is Youth.

Yeah.

Being young, not prolonging the onset of gradual decrepitude. We don't want to grow old slower, we want to remain fresh, young, vital and fully alive for a long, long time. Maybe for hundreds of years, thousands...millions?

Restoring the vitality and vigor of youth to an aging population is far more dangerous, seductive, and certain to become culturally obsessive than just letting people live for a few centuries in crowded tenements eating dogfood and watching gladiatorial soap operas on the vidwall.

Yick.

We don't want to grow old. We don't want to live next-door to the crazy cat-lady for a thousand years. We want to be young again. We want to be young in a way that most of us never were when we were young. Idealized. Remodeled and restructured from the stem-cells on upwards into perfect specimens of bright, young things. A million Marilyns and James Deans cruising along the avenues of continent-straddling cityscapes built from a warped sense of nostalgia and retro-style.

Shorpy
Always Something Interesting--a site that features tons of Historical Photos.

Snowshoe MenA group of New England military re-enactors dedicated to the portrayal of frontier soldiers from 1675-1783.

Soldier's Handbook
This is the real thing. All you need to know about the US Army, as far as the US Army is concerned. This is the book that new recruits get to read in order to sort themselves out, know their role, and get up to speed on what all the Sergeants are yelling about.

Story: The Seminar Page
McKee's STORYhas become something of the Materia Authorica amongst screenwriters and others. We're not so interested in the seminar itself, but the book looks interesting and is on our list for the summer.

Storylogue
This is McKee's online Ministry of Education for aspiring screenwriters, or just any writer at all who can fork over the cash required.

Strange Engines
Cool blog devoted to Civil War Steam Guns and other Curiosities. Quite helpful in doing research for some of the odder bits of technology in Wermspittle...

Streets of Shanghai
A site dedicated to exploring the way things were in Shanghai in the 1920s.

Subterranean Miscellanea
A great site to dig up some cool stuff that they very likely didn't teach you at college...and their links-page can keep you entertained for hours.

Levantia
All you ever wanted to know about Asia Minor in Byzantine times but weren't aware that you wanted to know about it...Seriously, this is a phenomenally useful site for historical research into a fascinating place and time that just screams out for RPG/fiction adaptation.

Perseus
A digital library of mythology that is one of the absolute best places to start digging around into matters mythological. They cover Greek Roman, Germanic, Arabic and Renaissance mythologies and more. Be Warned: this site can steal hours from you...

Phantazm
A webzine that delivers art, science fiction and more. Very interesting place to visit.

Philotomy's OD&D Musings
The essential site to go rummaging around in if you're at all interested in OD&D and/or those Retro-Clone systems that are modeled upon it.

Pulp Fantasy Library
An excellent series that used to run at Grognardia, still well worth taking a look at.

Pulp Series Character Reprint Index
An incredible treasure trove of information on over 120+ Pulp Characters that have been reprinted since the Twenties. Very helpful for those of us doing research in this area...

OSRIC
The Old School Reference and Index Compilation. Essentially AD&D with the serial numbers scratched-off and cleaned-up a bit. This rules-set will let you use most of the stuff that was produced for the Advanced form of the world's most popular RPG, breathing new life into all those remaindered modules and so forth. It has also sparked a rebirth of sorts in a cottage industry of developing adventures for a game system that was summarily abandoned by its custodians/care-takers/check-cashers years ago.

Note: There will be some amount of overlap and duplication between this list of links focused entirely on Public Domain Resources and the more general Links to Resources that we've arranged into alphabetical order along the left-hand sidebar of the blog. If anything, this redundancy ought to make your use of these two different resources all that much easier.

Our series: Revisiting the Public Domain will be continuing, and will have its own Index Page, once it has a few more entries.
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Featured Resource:

Public Domain SherpaA very useful tool for tracking down whether something is or is not in the Public Domain, or at least it's a very good start. After this it takes professional researchers, librarians, and lawyers...and money.

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Last Updated: April 29, 2011

Archive(dot)org (The Internet Archive)
A tremendous repository of books, films, audio, and more and all of it in the Public Domain. You could spend entire weeks just mining the amazing lost treasures buried all over the various interconnected sites that make up the Archive.

Creative Commons
Everything you need to know, care to know, want to know or just might need to know all in one handy place.

Everything New is Old Again by netherwerks
We go on and on about Public Domain superheroes from the Golden Age, amongst other, related stuff.

The Free Library
Millions of articles, books and more all of it free and online and ready to go right now.

Google Books
A quick and painless way to find online references that you probably already know about, but since we dislike assuming things, we included it anyhow.

Government Comics
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln maintains a sizable collection of vintage Government Comics that has to be seen to be believed. Some of this stuff might well prove useful to writers, artists, alternative historians, DMs and other mad-folk.

Hathi Trust
An online research library that can get you results that Google Books can't and probably won't.

Photos of the Great War
Photography from World War One. Be warned: you could lose a few hours sifting through this site if the subject matter is at all of any interest to you...and they provide a nice set of links to take you farther down into the trenches...

Photo-Sleuth
A great blog devoted to scrounging about and exploring vintage photos and associated things of great interest to anyone interested in said things, like us and maybe two of you lot.

Project Gutenberg
The original and still one of the best sources for Public Domain editions of just about anything/everything that has ever been written/published. It just keeps on growing and getting better--but they need all our support to keep going. Or better yet, you could sign-on as an editor, scanner or other volunteer...and of course they always need charitable contributions...

Public Domain Superheroes
A site that went from featuring information on Public Domain Superheroes to announcing its transition to becoming a cartoon-blog focused on Public Domain Characters to silence since Jan, 2011. Maybe they're still getting ready?

The Public Domain Treasure Hunter
This lady is a hardcore Public Domain researcher and here she offers courses on how to use Public Domain Sources in your work, but we haven't taken any and probably won't as we've been mucking about in this area for a long time now. She does offer some interesting tips and other stuff at her blog/site. Just be aware of the marketing.

USGS Map It
A service of the US Geological Survey that allows you to make maps based on real-world data that they have accumulated at tax-payer expense. It'd be fiscally foolish to not use this service.

The Vintage Library
Pulps that you can read from all across the web--a great place to start if you want to find out more about the Pulps and what-all goes along with them...

Vintage Pixels
An online database of images, some of which are in the Public Domain, most are available for use, though a few might cost you some cash...

Bad News Rising
Consider the role of classic Super-villains like Fu Manchu or Dracula. They aren't supposed to be push-overs. They are downright scary, menacing and very real threats to the 'good guys.' They take a long-term viewpoint and tend to have contingency plans, back-ups and more. They do the sorts of things that a good player would do in their place. And then some.

Chocolate in History, Chocolate in RPGs
Done as one of our entries for the 2011 A-to-Z Challenge, this essay takes a look at the role that Chocolate has played in history, politics and more, with an eye to giving writers & DMs ideas that they can use in their own settings and games based on this real-life bitter-sweet stuff.

The Amazing Mr. X, also known as The Spiritualist, is a Public Domain movie from 1948 that deals with an unscrupulous and manipulative Medium known as Mr. X and how he and his nefarious schemes are all bollixed and brought low by getting too involved with his victim (played by Lynn Bari). The film stars Turhan Bey which is worth a few bonus trivia points to those of our readers who are familiar with a certain 'Lost World' of the far future where our scaly friends maintain a significant, if often overlooked Empire...

You can find a copy of the film -for free- at the Internet Archive, or just watch it below, like we're doing. Hey, who took the popcorn?

H. Beam Piper Encyclopedia at Wikispaces
A really nice project aimed at compiling an encyclopedia derived from all those clues, off-hand references, tid-bits and loose ends that H. Beam Piper left scattered all through his stories like a marvelous trail of breadcrumbs.

History Buff
Another history-oriented blog that is very readable, not dry and boring.

Hexagon Comics
Hundreds of French comics characters that are in the process of getting translated and transferred over to the English-speaking part of the world. There are some fascinating characters in this lot.

Galactic Central
An extensive index of magazines, including Pulps and others, that can keep a researcher busy for days...

The Game Crafter
These people will help you produce the parts and print the cards or whatever it takes to make your home-brewed game into a published, transactable reality...We haven't tried them out just yet, but they really seem to know what they are doing!

Gaming Paper
Purveyors of fine game-oriented hex-paper that comes on a roll, and in other formats as well. Interesting niche-oriented hobby supporting business.

Gaslight
An online discussion list devoted to the literature produced between 1800-1919, with an especial emphasis on adventures and weird stuff. Yay!

The Godzilla Saga
An incredible treasure trove of information and ideas pertaining to Godzilla that bleeds over into the Wold Newton Universe. You might also be interested in our interview with Chris Nigro who builds and maintains The Godzilla Saga site: Go Go Godzilla

GoogleBooks
An incredibly useful research tool that should only get better as everything 'real,' and 'worthwhile' gets assimilated into the web and all knowledge that matters is online or else, by definition, it just won't matter...or so some people seem to think. We liked books before Google, we still like books, real books, after Google. You can pry that last copy of Encyclopedia Cthulhiana from our cold, (un)dead fingers...

Government Comics
Yep. Government-published Comics. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln maintains a huge collection of these odd-ball treasures, some of which are truly inspiring...

Burning Zeppelin Experience
This blog provides creative prompts for creative writing that have been quite interesting. We kind of got derailed in our efforts along these lines due to the A-to-Z Challenge, but as that craziness has passed, we're planning on returning to this site for a few more good prompts, like This One, and the micro-story that resulted HERE.

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This Is My Commonplace Blog

"This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots—for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on."

Some Soundtrack Options

All the original text of Old School Heretic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, except where it is the contribution of a guest author and all such material is used by permission and copyrighted by those respective parties as noted in each such instance. All items from the Public Domain are clearly marked as such and obviously remain Public Domain.